Lessons from Vanta’s WebAuthn migration

In this ongoing series, you’ll hear directly from the teams keeping Vanta—and most importantly, our customers—secure. Today’s post by Rob Picard and Jess Chang on the Security team explains why and how we migrated to WebAuthn as the mandatory way to log into Okta. 

‍

‍

Why we migrated to WebAuthn

Vanta’s mission is to ‍secure the internet and protect consumer data—and as a company, security is always top of mind. To that end, the Vanta Security team recently took the step of transitioning our employees and apps to using WebAuthn devices as the mandatory way to log into Okta. Our primary motivation was our own mission, as well as the ever-present issue of phishing, increasing adoption of WebAuthn, and the growing implementation of passkeys with platform authenticators. 

‍

In the past, it was common for organizations to look to passwordless authentication by deploying YubiKeys, or hardware authentication devices. However, most computers and phones deployed today have built-in FIDO2 keys as platform authenticators. This applies to all devices in use at Vanta. With Okta in use as our identity provider, we were able to rely on Okta’s built-in functionality to enforce enrollment of employee laptops and phones.

‍

‍

Our migration strategy

At Vanta, we onboarded every employee onto biometric authentication over the course of a month with minimal disruption, clear resources, and individual reminders. In partnership with our Enterprise Engineering team, we implemented the change by providing employee resources and a lightweight survey to track employee migration.

‍

Specifically, employees were asked to add biometric keys to Okta on both their laptop and their phone, then submit a short form to indicate their readiness. We set up automation to then add all users who’d submitted the survey into a WebAuthn enforcement group. 

‍

For any edge cases, we set up a separate group for employees who requested an exception for any reason and opted to automatically grant exceptions for all requests to prevent undue delay.

‍

In terms of applications, we tested each separately to determine which couldn’t support WebAuthn and created an application exception group. While this mostly went seamlessly, we ran into a few issues with managed Chrome browsers since a few employees had passkeys which were tied to their old Chrome profiles. This resulted in a handful of employees being locked out of their Chrome profile and therefore unable to log in using their passkey, which required extra support. 

‍

‍

Communication and resources to support employees

First, we communicated our planned WebAuthn rollout to our leadership team, followed by all managers. Our goal was to help set expectations for their organizations and teams and get the ball rolling with migrations—especially from those who tend to have the busiest schedules at Vanta.

‍

To set up our employees for success, we created and shared a range of initial resources including the following:

‍

• Short video with enrollment instructions for both laptop and phone
• Article with details on biometric authentication, steps for setup, and how to get help
• Slack channel for dedicated support
• Office hours for hands-on support from the team

‍

As we approached the deadline for migration, we set up automated Slack notifications for employees with friendly reminders and guidance for how to add biometric keys, and also followed up with a handful of employees manually if they had questions. 

‍

‍

Edge cases and solutions

In the process of migrating to WebAuthn across the company, we ran into edge cases for employee migration including the following:

‍

• Discomfort with enabling FaceID/facial recognition for biometric authentication
• Biometric authentication broken on device
• Employee on extended leave (e.g. parental, medical) or time-off
• Use of unsupported browsers (e.g. Firefox) or multiple browsers

‍

Given that each of these cases must be handled differently depending on the circumstances, we opted to set up a trackable, documented exception workflow that required a clear explanation using our internal ticketing system. For these users, we required a non-biometric, phishing-resistant form of multifactor authentication (MFA) and slowly moved users off the exception group when possible.

‍

‍

Our results

While we hit a few small bumps in the road, our overall migration went smoothly and we were able to migrate 95% of our employees and 90% of applications within the span of a month. All exceptions are documented and officially reviewed. This change not only provides our employees with a seamless authentication experience, but also helps us keep Vanta more secure.

‍

‍

Tips for migration

While plans for migrating to WebAuthn will differ between companies and teams, here are a few lessons we learned:

‍

• Clarity over complexity: As Security professionals, remember to use terms that are accessible and understandable to all employees, especially when you’d like them to take action. For instance, we opted to refer to this project as the rollout of biometric authenticators instead of referring to FIDO2 or WebAuthn, terms which could have been more nuanced to grasp.
• Always over-communicate: Your employees are extremely busy, and it’s important to emphasize and over-communicate action items—then deliver quickly and answer questions quickly to be thoughtful of their time.
• Eliminate red tape: Find ways to prioritize employee experience and eliminate red tape, where possible. We opted to automatically grant exceptions upon request to help enable our employees to do their jobs. While any risk is a risk, the marginal increase in the risk of one individual not being behind biometric authentication is relatively minimal.
• Bake in extra time: Remember that your employees are busy and even with the best of intentions, your deadlines may slip. Communicate an earlier deadline in order to build in buffer time, especially if you’re approaching a holiday or a particularly busy time for your organization.
• Always be prepared: Even with the best of preparation and resources, you may run into cases where users misunderstand your instructions. Be prepared with extra resources, patience, and the reminder that we’re all trying our best.

‍

Looking for more resources and best practices from Vanta's Security team? Read Our approach to threat modeling next!